By TerryUPDATE: This blog post is for an old version of Bosca Ceoil, and is out of date! Bosca Ceoil v2.0 is available from here: boscaceoil.net
I made a thing! It’s a simple music creation tool, called Bosca Ceoil (pronouced “bus-ka kyo-al”, Irish for “Music Box/Accordion”).
I made this because I find other music programs really confusing and distracting. Too many panels, buttons and knobs! I wanted something really simple, something designed to work the way I tend to create stuff – a process that I suppose I could best describe as: make something super simple, and keep tweaking it until it starts to get good.
Bosca Ceoil is all about looping, and designed that way at its heart. Songs are built up from lots of tiny 16 note patterns – the intended workflow is that you loop over these single patterns until you have something you like, then you start making variations. If you approach it this way, you’ll find it’s pretty decent at doing that – but it’s not very good at other things, like say, long melody lines. It is what it is! I made it for myself, and the way I work, but hopefully some of you out there will find it useful too. It’s free, and open source under the FreeBSD licence. If anyone wants to port it/fork it, go for it! It’s on github here.
[Download for Mac (v1.1)]
(for Linux, more info here)
[download adobe air]
It’s a pretty simple program, and only takes about five minutes to learn how to use. Here’s a tutorial to get you started!
(if Bosca Ceoil is too much of a mouthful, feel free to just call it Bosca)
GREAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!
use it in all my LudumDare!!!! Perfect
Hi everyone! I made a web version of Bosca Ceoil so you can create/import/export tracks online and share them with others.
You can find it here: https://dy-dx.github.io/boscaceoil-online/
And here’s a demo: https://dy-dx.github.io/boscaceoil-online/#!/track/0Qc3YWqk9d
Great! That’s really useful, thanks very much
this is awesome
This program needs its own forum and submission website!
Magnifico !!! Simple y poderoso, es lo que estaba buscando para crear la música de mis juegos !!! You’re the man !!!
This software is absolutely amazing. I have made about 30 pseudo-chiptune tracks with it which i’d consider good. I would PAY for this! (not that i want to because im glad its free but still)
I’m really glad to hear that, glad you’ve gotten some use out of it! 🙂
I think that the minor scale is wrong – only the third is flattened, not the sixth or seventh.
Hi!
This is awesome! Could you please add export to MIDI to the web version? I can’t run the local version because of adobe air, but I can run the online version in chrome.
Thanks!
it told me that it required flash and the run flash screen didn’t work for the online version on my chromebook.
I cant export the files it says open when i try to
export them not save so i cant please help (im on windows)
Hey, is there any way you could bring this onto mobile? This is a good program, keep up the good work. ðŸ‘ðŸ»
I think this is really great but whenever I try to make an account the screen brings up a pop up that says” Error: 100 XMLHttpRequest failed: {} “. Hope you can help
every time I TRY to make a song it always tells me that I need a flash when the flash popup never shows up like its being blocked.👿👿👿👿🤬😿😿😿
in the recent macOS update “Catalina” 32bit apps aren’t supported anymore is there anyway you can get this out in 64bit?
Hey – I’ve got it on my to-do list, but it’s not a straightforward thing to fix. I hope to fix it eventually, but it might take a while, since I have a lot of commitments to Dicey Dungeons right now that that priority. Sorry!
it’s not working on Chromebook.
Chromebooks aren’t supported, sorry